Arts & Culture | Theater

Unsung, for the most part, in this country, Hanna Krall is a literary titan in Europe, where her stories are renowned for their fairy tale-like evocation both of the Shoah and of prewar Jewish life in her native Poland. Now comes “The King of Hearts is Off Again,” a Polish stage adaptation of her 2007 bestselling novel, “Chasing the King of Hearts,” which opens next week in the East Village. When it ran in 2012 in Los Angeles, critic Steven Leigh Morris of the L.A. Weekly called it “thrilling physical theater.”

Music runs like a river through Jonathan Lethem’s best-selling 2003 novel, “The Fortress of Solitude,” set in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The work centers on the unlikely friendship between two boys, one Jewish and the other African American, as both navigate a world being turned upside down by drugs and economic inequality,

Rude awakenings are the raw material of drama. Ever since the unfortunate King Oedipus, characters have been jolted to realize that their self-image is colossally, and, ultimately, catastrophically different from the ways in which others have perceived them.

His name may not ring a bell, but his music became part of the soundtrack of American pop culture. Raymond Scott was a bandleader, pianist, composer and inventor of electronic instruments whose zany melodies were used in more than 100 animated shorts. In the new play, “Powerhouse,” Scott comes roaring back to life. When “Powerhouse” premiered at the Fringe Festival five years ago, Jason Zinoman of The New York Times called it “one steam train of a drama … the rare Fringe show that lives up to its title.” A revised version opened last weekend in the West Village.

From Neil Diamond’s 1969 gospel-infused tune, “Holly Holy,” to this past summer’s “Song of Solomon: The Musical” by Andrew Beall and Neil van Leeuwen, the Song of Songs from the Hebrew Bible has inspired American songwriters for generations. Now comes pianist Dina Pruzhansky’s chamber opera, “Shulamit,” which centers on the bold and beautiful lover taken by King Solomon. The work, which premieres this weekend at the JCC Manhattan, will be sung in Hebrew with English supertitles.

The puppet at the center of Zvi Sahar’s “Salt of the Earth” is made out of an Israeli combat bag from the 1967 war. Sahar thought that he might make the figure out of stone or olive wood, but when he saw the bag at a Jaffa flea market, he liked it immediately.